Severe editor bugs in Chrome/Mac

Extreme glitchiness (pardon the pun :wink: with this file https://glitch.com/edit/#!/emoji-mascot-generator?path=server.js:87:6

Steps for me to reproduce the issues:
1: Highlight/selection issue
Load in Chrome
Remix from https://glitch.com/edit/#!/twitterbot-autorespond?path=README.md:1:100
Highlight text
(Expected: stays highlighted. Actual: Removes selection immediately)
This broke everything else that used highlighting too: copy/paste, ask for help, etc.

2: Mismatch between front-end and server
I loaded in Safari to see if it was the project or the browser
Everything was out of order. It was as if all my attempts to copy/paste or delete had succeeded on the backend but not the front end, resulting in a dozen or so blocks of code being out of order. Then I refreshed in Chrome and saw the same out of order view.
Editing only in Safari seems to have fixed this. I started over from scratch but man, what a bug.

More evidence for my ā€œfront-end/back-end mistmatchā€ theory is that I was getting nonsensical errors in the logs in Chrome. (ā€œparse error: Objects must consist of key:value pairs at line 13, column 2ā€). There was no syntax error in Chrome (I put the entire object declaration through lint - not just that line - and I even tried rewriting from scratch). Everything passed. However when the mangled code loaded in Safari, it was obvious that there were many parse errors.

Browser extensions:
Per Anilā€™s question on Twitter, I do have some chrome extensions that can modify the page (though Iā€™ve never had issues like JS or HTML interference before). Namely: Ad Block Plus, Amazon Wish List, LastPass, Highly, Pocket, Pinterest, The Great Suspender, Video Speed Controller, and MetaMask. Safari only has LastPass installed.

Sorry you can ran into this. We havenā€™t seen this come up before, so weā€™re keen to understand the cause. Does this happen consistently in your Chrome with other projects too? If so, if you could try an incognito window which doesnā€™t have the plugins running, that would help us narrow down the cause.

It does happen consistently, in every project, and every file except README. Probably not a coincidence that READMEā€™s donā€™t have the ā€œask for helpā€ button. In the console, I get some warnings, but nothing obviously related.

It doesnā€™t happen in Incognito mode (which only has Adblock Plus). And good news: I was able to enable/disable extensions until I think I found the problem. It disappears when I disable Highly.

I think something about a conflict between your code and Highly is causing the highlighting and front-end sync issues. As luck would have it, I know those guys, so I could intro if thatā€™s helpful.

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@Gareth I chatted with the Highly devs and I think I may have actually been able to resolve this!

I think the upshot for you guys is: Is it possible that any extension that also tries to use text selection leads to breaking issues in Glitch? (eg the issue I had where the server stored different code than the UI showed). If you want to dig into this with Highly Iā€™d be happy to intro you.

The fix, per Highly:

  • Theyā€™ve gotten reports of this before
  • They added Glitch to a list of sites they pro-actively ignore
  • New Highly users get the new ignore list
  • Old Highly users should make sure they have the latest version (I did) and disable/re-enable the extension (which erases the cache & pulls the new list).

After re-enabling, I canā€™t repro the bugs anymore, so it seems to work!

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Perfect, thanks for the assist @staringispolite :pray: Highly here, this is our quick fix, weā€™ll see what we can do going forward to avoid having to block the domain entirely. But we play well with static text and not so much with input/editable content. Cheers!

Thanks for following up on this with them and for the quick fix @wuebben. This might explain why I was unable to reproduce trying this out with my own highly extension, as perhaps it had already been blocked!